The haunted dollhouse, revisited

If you’re a long-time reader then you know that over the last 10 years I’ve been building a miniature homage to all my favorite horror and fantasy stories. It’s in the form of a dollhouse that I built myself and is filled with hundreds and hundreds of pieces that I’ve bought or made, and one of my favorite things to do is to have people come over and see how many allusions they could recognize. (32 is the current standing record.) A few years ago I had to put away the dollhouse and pack all of the furniture up in boxes because between Hailey’s curious hands and the cat’s insatiable urge to pull down all the bats from the attic it just wasn’t safe for anyone. So it’s stood, empty and abandoned, for years. Until this morning, that is, when I got my Mother’s Day gifts of:

1) an impromptu harmonica wake-up call at 6am.

2) a handmade card with a kissing robot on it.

3) a plexiglass display case made just for my dollhouse.

Best Mother’s Day ever.

PS. Hailey and I have spent all morning going through the boxes of tiny crucifixes and vampire hunting kits and poisoned apples and mischievous brownies and Egyptian mummies I’m not even remotely close to being finished because every time I pull out a piece I have to explain why Death wears a tophat, or how phoenix tears can save you from death. It’s a long (and absolutely wonderful) process. I’ll have pictures of the insides in a few weeks. But until then?